Saturday, 20 December 2008

Affiliate Marketing For Merchants

When it comes to affiliate marketing, many people are involved on the affiliate end, rather than the merchant end. However, a growing number of average folks are establishing e-commerce websites, where they are selling their own line of products or services. If you are one of these people, think about the marketing options available to you. Search engines, pay-per-clicks and e-mail marketing…each of which, while effective, can cost you a lot of time and money. Why not let other people use these means to promote your website for you? If you think this is a good idea and decide to act upon it, you would be engaging in the merchant end of affiliate marketing.


On the merchant end of affiliate marketing, you have control over what your affiliates can promote and how they get paid. Most merchants pay when a sale or lead has commenced, though there are pay-per-click and pay-per-impression affiliate programs available. The latter two are recommended if you are looking to build traffic quickly, though you should make sure that your affiliates don’t use unethical, black-hat techniques to draw traffic to your website. In either case you can further reward your affiliates by offering payment in a system of tiers. Tiers could be used if an affiliate has reached a certain threshold of products sold or leads generated. They could also be used to reward affiliates who are able to get new affiliates to sign up for your program. Additional rewards can be provided through individualized commission rates, where you can give your higher-producing affiliates the opportunity to earn more money for themselves and your business.


How do you get started with the merchant side of affiliate marketing? You could buy affiliate marketing scripts, though if you do not have sufficient knowledge of HTML Javascript don’t bother. Another option is signing up with an affiliate marketing service such as Commission Junction. The advantage with this is that the service takes care of managing your affiliate program for you, along with the payments but it could take hundreds of dollars to get started. The best way to go about the merchant end of affiliate marketing is to find a web host that provides affiliate marketing tools within its account manager. Frontier Power Hosting, a premier hosting service used by Internet gurus such as Jim Edwards and Armand Morin, offers affiliate marketing tools to its customers at no additional cost.

Once you have gotten your affiliate program set up, it’s time to look for affiliates. The quickest way to do this is to advertise your affiliate opportunity in Internet marketing forums. However, keep in mind that the field of affiliate marketing is very competitive… you must offer rates and/or special incentives that separate you from another merchant.
You will also have to prove that you will pay, something that affiliates won’t know about until they actually work with you. To increase the confidence of potential affiliate marketing candidates, consider signing up for the Better Business Bureau. Through this company, your business will be evaluated periodically. As long as you do the right thing, they will give you a good rating, something that is very attractive to both future customers and affiliate marketers.




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